Trinity
by Ted Empty
Summary: A series of snips revolving around alternate sets of Endbringers. The first three take place in a universe switching the Endbringers and the Triumvirate.
1. A-1: Colossus

Trinity

Part One – Colossus

It all started in the sky.

As most things that start in the sky tend to be, this thing was by nature foreign to the race of monkeys below the sky, living, fucking, and dying on a ball of mud hurtling through the universe.

Recently, a pair of things that in all other circumstance should not be due to their impossible nature visited many iterations of said mudball.

One of them died.

The other forgot how to live.

In the process of dying however the last spiteful application of a complex system of weapons opened in the impossible workings of the thinking corpse's mind.

Monsters. She'd create monsters.

Great champions to fight them as well, but monsters.

One way or another, she would bring one last End.

Julian Keyes stared at a screen for money. When something on the screen was abnormal, he would tell someone. The thing that was on his screen at this exact moment was thoroughly not normal and in fact, rather worrying. So he voiced his objection towards the abnormality and his opinion was heard.

"What do you mean it just "appeared" there?"

The person that was responsible for signing Mr. Keyes checks was sweating.

"I don't know, Mr. Walsh. The object isn't very large, but its projected trajectory puts it within an uncomfortably close range of a major population center. It's gonna hit Athens, sir."

"Hrm." A grunt and neat mopping of the brow seemed to calm the suited overseer's nerves.

"Phone the Protectorate and inform them it would be prudent of Seraph to intercept it, unless they want a major disaster in a civilian area."

"Isn't that what superheroes are for, sir?'

"Indeed."

-

Adelaide Hiller was troubled. She was a member of the most powerful group of Parahumans on Earth, she was reared as the personal savior of her homeland and she had abilites of the mind unpossessed by any mortal. She was the incarnation of grace, dignity, civility, and beauty.

She couldn't see a damn thing about this stupid, cowfucking meteor. She had racked her brain the entirety of her flight to Greece, crossrefrenced the past, present, and future instances of herself and simply found nothing regarding this thing. It could be a part of its spaceborn nature, or a natural result of not being an object originating on earth. She continued pondering, even as she touched down in the heart of Athens. Due to being informed of her presence there and the disaster she was preventing, evacuation efforts were minimal and mostly performed by the paranoid or panicky.

Or lucky.

Adelaide soared into the sky, penetrating the atmospheric layers and preparing to grab the meteor with her prodigious telekinetic skill. She could see the streaking point of light above her, a fireball the size of a house.

She couldn't grab it. She-She-why can't she - why is it such - SHE CANNOT GRAB IT

The small group of civilians beneath her began to express fear and panic. Why couldn't this great champion grab the stone? Evacuation efforts sharply increased in volume.

They needed to get away, this could be very very ba-

Impact.

Death, massive. The force of impact? Equivalent to that of a nuclear blast. Earthquakes that shook the Earth and tore the streets radiated from the decimated epicenter.

And then the meteor got up.

Adelaide, from her aerial vantage point, was only mildly concussed from the raw force of the shockwave that struck her body. So she was one of the first to ever view the creature. The impossible, beautiful creature.

Large. The size of a five-story building at least, maybe more. A strange mockery of a human figure, evoking thoughts of a broken, Hellenistic sculpture. The stony parts of the beat appeared to be made of polished marble, with rivulets of writhing metallic not-bronze twisted and throughout, as if fighting the stone for dominance. In random arrangements this sculpted armor surrounded the creature's entire, humanoid body. Truly a perfect figure, a beautiful mockery of human form. A bald head composed entirely of the stuff crowned the beast, with a cold, unblinking, but assuredly feminine face staring emptily at the devastation. In the partitions and places where the statue-flesh was not, lean muscular flesh as solid black as the devil himself and his foulest nightmare fused the shattered pieces.

It looked massive, impossibly heavy and at least partially inorganic.

And yet it moved.

The colossus rose to its feet steadily and surveyed its surroundings with stony eyes. It looked upon all it was to destroy, as the impossible thoughts racing through its core instructed the massive beast. It felt...intelligent. Like it could process the scene around it with impossible clarity. It then moved. It moved far more quickly than one would expect, swooping towards a building, windows shattered and body battered. With one swipe of itss almost skeletal hands and lithe arms, the titan tore through the structure as if it was cleaving through butter.

Adelaide thought they may have a problem here.

And so they battled. The assembled heroes of the mudball fought on a grand stage with the towering creature. In a world where men were known to create fire and lightning from air, the creature's abilities were fairly straightforward. It extruded far, far more strength than a creature of its size and mass should have, pounding into the Earth with shattering force and tossing skyscrapers around as if they were props in a grand comedy.

It moved very quickly, dashing across the landscape, taking flight above the battlefield from time to time.

It thought. They had not thought it could think but it thought with more systematic precision and speed than nearly any of the creatures in its path. It countered attacks with stunningly good timing, warding off blasts of scouring light with simple maneuvers. It could defy gravity and deftly take flight, sometimes striking into the earth to trigger further blasts and earthquakes.

It simply refused to die, and that was the worst part. It could survive any attack placed upon it with a stunning lack of giving a shit, emerging from nuclear fireballs and storms of scouring dust with nary an abrasion on itself. More esoteric attacks, blenders of space and time and what can or cannot be done could wound it, but slowly. Not too little. Just a small enough amount that the actions of defending capes could be counted as little more than an annoyance by the Colossus.

After a combination of simply ravishing the city until a true wasteland had formed and the somewhat inconvenient damage it had accrued, the Colossus simply raised its arms and ascended.

And so it was, the first of many. Enormous beasts that would strike population centers, retreating to unreachable locales for safety between strikes.

Many names were slung around for these beasts. Harbinger, Titan, Olympian. Of course, only one name would be chosen in the end. One name could suit these great beings that butcher so many like pigs.

Endbringer.


	2. A-1: Ophanim

Trinity

Part Two: Ophanim

Angels were never meant to be pretty.

The beings closest to god were described a no less than monstrous, with wings and eyes and animal's parts in places where logic dictates they should not be.

Man grew comfortable with the thought of winged guardians, the caretakers of paradise beyond death. Light was purity. Light was grace.

The Warrior took the form of light and gold and all things good for this reason.

Yet the monsters of the thinking corpse also had potential to use this. And use this they did.

Mecca, 1996.

It appeared. It did not appear with a crash or a bang. It flickered into existence, seemingly from nothing. Floating in the sky.

It stood as tall as four men upon another's shoulders. It was an adonis, a being of pure beauty at first glance that would rival Scion's visage of perfection. And then you looked a bit closer, and saw it looking back at you from all angles. For one, it had no head. In the place a head or neck would be, a ring hovered, lined with eyes in perfect symmetry. Such wheels hung behind the creature in place of any wings, slowly rotating at opposite directions.

The arms tapered off at the wrists, giving way to another pair of floating wheels. These, however did not stare, instead each adorned with a foursome of spindly, nigh mechanical fingers. From within these rings, an eye floated where each palm would be.

On its perfect torso, the ocular anomalies did not slow in the slightest. The creature's perfect form was absolutely covered in eyes, with varying pupils and irises and sclera ranging from the absolutely monstrous to the all-too-human. They darted to and fro, with all directions being seen at any time.

Its legs, however, held no such things below the knees, where a long, insectoid and apparently prosthetic replacement for each leg tapered off to a needlelike point. There were no eyes there. The rest of it made up for that.

They stared with hate.

And fire.

Random, scouring bursts of light flickered from the creature's body, demolishing the streets and structures below. Pilgrims to the holy city fled in terror, convinced God's wrath had finally befallen them. The beams changed direction, split, and phased through objects the not-angel deemed obstructive. Ice and flame and all manner of fell things ensued wherever the creature's gaze befell.

As for its combatants...they couldn't even touch it. The flickering beat would simply move from the place where these simple creatures would dare strike it, faster than the eye could dare to perceive. The occasional strike of massive proportion would catch it from time to time, but it cared little. It may have been less physically imposing than its siblings, but it moved in such ways that it was wholly unconcerned.

-

Ahmad Khadem was troubled. As the strongest man on the planet, and the first parahuman to defy the simple para- suffix and wholly embrace the title of "super", he should not have been troubled. Yet, he was, as the holiest place he knew of was being scrubbed from the earth by a being he could not perceive as anything less than an angel.

He was uncertain of this being's significance, and was in fact troubled about its nature. He had fallen into a pattern; almost a sort of rhythm regarding his battles with the great Colossus and for reasons inexplicable to him believed she was the only one of her kind, a monster alone with the world against it.

Now he knew better. There was no denying it, the creature he was bending fire and heat towards and volleying blasts of scorching immaterial power with was another beast like the monster that fell from the sky.

Behind his cyclopic helmet, within his suit of black, rigid armor, Ahmad frowned.

-

Eventually, the wheeled angel ceased its horrifying assault and simply disappeared, returning to whatever unknowable abyss it came from. In truth, however, the creature was blinking across a thousand places at relativistic speeds, seemingly unconcerned with its blatant violation of what simply should be.

The world beneath again struggled with a proper name for the new Endbringer.

The more spiritually inclined at the only table that truly mattered knew what it should be.

The watching creature could be none other than the Ophanim. The wheels of God's Chariot itself.

And so it was.


	3. A-1: Morpheus

Trinity

Part Three: Morpheus

Dream a little dream, why don't you?

It's all we can do. Look around you, tip-tap-typing away, seeing the people scream about worlds that will never exist.

All a dream is, all it can be, is a mess of thought and emotion and primal fear.

You could get more information from staring at a steer's ass, watching the shapes that emerge.

Ah, but nightmares. Nightmares are something special indeed. They're an abject horror. A horror that is unflappable, unpredictable, and rarely the exact same twice.

Soon the world was to know nightmares.

Anders Larsen was befuddled.

Why wasn't the monster doing what it was supposed to do?

He looked at the Endbringer, currently in the process of demolishing Washington D.C. It was taller than the Ophanim and shorter than the Colossus. It stood like a man, with an ever so slight lurch, its face a blank mask only marred by a pair of glowing eyes. It had an almost regal presence to it, what with its body naturally resembling armor fit for a king, and the cloak of arms behind it. From its shoulder blades, four long, flat, segmented arms grew. Each of these, tipped with a threesome of spindly, grasping claws. The armor around its wrists and ankles was decorated with elaborate, crownlike patterns. The entire body of the creature shimmered with aesthetic perfection, giving a slightly hazy, dreamlike quality to the creature. Some were so paralyzed by its beauty that movement was forgone to gaze at the beast.

Overall this creature resembled a cape more than a monster. It had a definite humanity to its appearance, more so than the Ophanim or even the Colossus.

It was far less human that either.

Anders Larsen, Jormungandr of the Triumvirate and the man who could shape oceans, was befuddled.

The Monster raised its six arms, conjuring a gathering tempest of spacial distortion. Whirlwinds of crushing gravity ripped structures from their roots, macerating the marble and stone into gravelly dust. Anders didn't want to think about the red in the stone.

The thing that bugged him about this monstrosity is that it had no pattern. Whereas Colossus would drop from the sky, knock around a city for a day or two, than leave, this thing seemed more focused than anything else. It was headed for the capitols. With a flickering flash of distortion, the Endbringer stood, looking directly at Capitol Hill. And then it fired. From its right hand a stream of flame vomited from the creature, incinerating every meaningless seat of power in the building. The ruins of the Washington Monument smoked in its wake.

It couldn't do this last time.

Last year, right at the turn of the century, this thing spontaneously appeared in Sydney, Australia. It seemed to time its entry just as the ball hit the pavement, for whatever sick reason. Back then, it had displayed an ENTIRELY different powerset and an...entirely different goal. Back then, it had just wanted to kill as many people as it could. Now it seemed to be targeting the establishments and relics of the United States itself, wielding flame and lightning and distortion as its weaponry. People fled to no avail, trapped in the debris-filled cyclones obliterating the capital. The White House was gone, now. Obliterated by another flash of heat and now a mere smear of ashes. The creature's four appendages flung lightning and death at every ape it could reach, allowing truly few to even touch it.

Jormungandr had to do something. Calling a fine mist into the air, he dashed across the particulates of water, preparing himself to strike the enormous beast.

He swore he could almost hear a low, bitter laugh.

-

And so the nightmare Endbringer displayed its true colors. It was the truly horrifying one, the one they could not predict. It showed up out of sync with the others, with new tactics and powers each time.

Once, it arrived in Monaco and tried to kill as many children as it could, mind-controlling parents into doing deplorable things.

Another time, it appeared, walked into Moscow and detonated with the force of a hydrogen bomb.

They had to christen this creature something. The sheer horrific surreality of it all, the contrast of it, meant it needed a name of ethereal quality.

So Morpheus was named.


End file.
